This is an image of a sewage outpour from above that seeps into the mudflats in the Sulaibikhat/Doha coastal area.
These images of Doha and Sulaibikhat coastal areas of Kuwait oscillate between the dream-like, wanton vignettes of the space and the concretized corporeality of human intervention.
There is a permeability of boundaries between concrete, wire, mudflats, and the silhouettes of shadow-forms and hazy lens shots of human skin. These visuals embody a ‘third space’ where the natural, sentient, and industrial all mesh in a cesspool mirrored by the sewage outpours of human waste and the micro bacteria that populate the mudflats, which all ebb and flow in intertidal zones. What remains here is a culmination of fragmented ideas on life and how it settles, self-destructs, and adapts.
The body of work questions the complexities of interwoven narratives and histories—whether those histories are of an individual’s experience of a landscape or of a landscape’s moderate shifts overtime that are largely indifferent to said individual’s memories of a place.
The area has a scarcely documented past that is visually documented by the photographer now erased by the closure of the national reserve, Entertainment City (theme park), and the sewage outpours and industrial power plants–the communities that have lived in this area were thus moved to governmental housing with very little left from that time. The project also examines layers of ecological disasters in the area such as depleted Uranium disaster zones and topographic marking from the American military base (Camp Doha) and the Gulf War. After this erasure, and over the span of five years, these images of the Doha and Sulaibikhat coastal areas of Kuwait bend the photographer’s understanding of memory, belonging, and the past. This makes this project a personal, pseudo- documentary perception of a narrative, not the narrative of gathered information—whether visual or oral or textual.
